KORKUT2026

Rites
of Eternal Wind

Il Korkut Sonic Arts Triennale

Dedicated to sound and listening, the Triennale creates a space for a wide range of sonic practices without restricting them by institutional boundaries. Over the course of two months, Rites of Eternal Wind will host sound installations and live events, listening sessions and soundwalks, hybrid lectures, discussions and workshops, somatic performances and explorations of sonic rituals and environments where sound is absent or even impossible.

Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture

Anastasia Tolchneva

Anastasia Tolchneva, also known as Lovozero, is an artist and composer working at the intersection of sound, performance, and technology. She is a researcher of supernatural vocal techniques and sonic affects.

Her interest in experimental music is rooted in somatic practices, experimental dance, and posthumanist philosophy. Anastasia’s early sound works were connected to sacred music and the search for authentic vocalization. Later, this practice evolved to include extended vocal techniques, somatic optics, and digital systems for sound processing and synthesis. Today, Anastasia approaches sound production as a vital biopolitical tool with unlimited potential.

After moving to Almaty in 2022, Lovozero almost immediately emerged in key projects related to the city’s experimental music scene. She participated in the Prepared Surroundings community showcase during the first edition of the Korkut Triennale. As a composer and performer, Anastasia has taken part in concerts of the Qazaq indie supergroup, including BARSAKELMES — the inaugural performance marking the opening of the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, where she performed in a duo with Saadet Türköz.

Anastasia is the curator of the ŞU ŞAŞU experimental sound event series in Almaty. She is also a Kuryokhin Prize laureate (2017).

Rite of Qūralai
Performance (2026)

For Rites of the Eternal Wind, Lovozero creates a new collective work, Rite of Qūralai, in collaboration with Zhanna Tulendy, director and founder of the Jolda dance collective, and choreographer and dancer Nurbäk Batulla. In Rite of Qūralai, the artists and performers engage with somatic intuition, sonic events in a winter landscape, and the aggregate states of breath, wind, and sound. They explore symbiotic connections between imagery, memory, low temperatures, and acoustic phenomena, as well as the gradient between world-states, strange codependencies, and the transformation of limitations and trials into new possibilities for vitality. One of the central images of the performance is Qūralai salqyny, a wind named after saiga calves that blows in May, a natural phenomenon symbolizing endurance and faith in life.

Rite of Qūralai will be performed twice, at the beginning and at the end of the Triennale.
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The Seeker says:

“The black wind drives not only storm clouds, causing them to collide and produce a roar that can be heard across the entire continent. It also drives people from their familiar places, depriving them of their homes. I found myself in a foreign land that, for the first time in a long while, speaks to my heart. And the wind here is brown — qoñyr”